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Witness for the…Who, Exactly?

By Dick Cavett September 26, 2007 11:09 pmSeptember 26, 2007 11:09 pm

I was too young to understand what everyone was so excited about on a seemingly ordinary Sunday afternoon one December when my mother came out to collar my (only) friend Mary and me where we had been playing “Indians” — and marched us inside to hear the radio.

“I want you to hear this because it will mean something to you when you get older. The Japs have gotten us into the war.”

I was at a total loss. I didn’t know who “the Japs” were and I didn’t know what or where “the war” was, and there was a woman next door whose name was Pearl Evans. I liked her, and you simply have to take this on faith, but I was glad she wasn’t the Pearl who had gotten attacked.

What, I hear you cry, could this have to do with what I promised last time: more about R.M. Nixon? The somewhat strained connection is that it was the first time something thrillingly dramatic came into my life via a broadcast medium. That phrase was still singular way back then. There were to be four more such instances (the best was Watergate).

The very day my dad brought home our first television set, the Army-McCarthy hearings began — and were riveting. One met the great Joseph Welch and, at the other end of the human scale, the sparsely lamented lawyer Roy Cohn. So reptilian was Cohn in appearance — and in fact — that you expected him, at any moment, to shed his skin.

If you, dear reader, would rather hear more about Groucho than about Dicko (R.M.N.), I agree with you. But for the moment, the Yorba Linda Wonder must remain center stage, at least until I’ve therapeutically exorcised his ghost on your time, so to say.

John and Yoko came on my show in 1971. And came on again. Their appearances have been preserved on my “Dick Cavett Show” John and Yoko DVD. (I insert this for historical reference purposes only. Certainly not as an egregious commercial plug. And it just hit me that there are people out there who may wonder, “John and Yoko who?”)

A bit later certain things began to entangle John. He very nicely asked if I would be willing to do him a favor. Recklessly, perhaps, I said I would. Of course. Especially considering what he and his wife had done for my Nielsen numbers. Would I help him resist the Nixon White House’s plan to have him deported?

Deported, for God’s sake!

Sure! I said. [Ominous chord]

How did this lowdown scheme by the famously klutzy golfer get spawned? I didn’t learn until years later that on one of the infamous tapes out of which Nixon wove his own noose, the wily H. R. Haldeman can be heard inveighing against the top Beatle. Having presumably educated his boss as to who John Lennon was, Haldeman deftly stimulates the Nixon venom sacs with these fateful words: “This guy could sway an election.”

The justice department was enlisted and the only deportation proceeding against a musical artist that I know of began. (Think of it! A politicized justice department!)

Nervously approaching for the first time those lofty, majestic buildings with the grand pillars scared this still somewhat innocent lad from the Great Plains. I knew the main court building, with those long steps, from multiple viewings of Sidney Lumet’s classic “Twelve Angry Men.” With my heart at least halfway to my mouth, I entered what looked like the courtroom on “Law and Order,” although both it and Sam Waterston were still in my future.

And there down an echoing marble corridor stood John Lennon, dwarfed by the high-ceilinged architecture of this Temple of the Law. He was solemnly clad in a respectful black suit, pants tightly pegged, and those awful round glasses.

I was not a brilliant witness. Trusting my usual facility for ad-libbing to carry me through, it evaded me. Every few words were accompanied by unaccustomed internal self-criticism. As in:

“Mr. Cavett, what is good about John Lennon, in your view?”

[Gulp] “He’s a force for… [Dry mouth stops me for a moment as I wonder what in hell the rest of that sentence is going to be. What am I going to say?]…um…for good,” I managed to squeeze out. Haltingly, I bore on: “…for young people.”

“How, Mr. Cavett, for young people?”

“Well, as an example for young people who want to do… [Do just what, Dickie? Think of something!] “Who want to do something good with their lives.” [Jesus, Dick, that’s pitiful!]

I couldn’t look down from the stand at John, figuring he was thinking he might have done better inviting Sly Stone than me.

I got a chance to wince again at my alleged testimony when it was quoted in The New Yorker the following week. Somehow I can’t imagine I played a major role in the fact that John’s side won. But his victory supplied the administration with yet another self-inflicted wound to lick.

I’m sure that even the dullest reader can see how my aligning myself with John Lennon in court could well have narrowed my chances of, say, being invited to Tricia’s wedding.

And, reading your comments, I see that a perceptive reader has asked whether I had any other evidence of additional darts winged my way from Pennsylvania Avenue.

Yes. Years later I was stunned to learn that, post-Lennon, my entire staff was audited by the IRS, right down to the lowest secretary. (In rank, I mean. Nothing personal.)

I had nearly forgotten how “screwing” enemies real and imagined by illegally wielding the IRS as a weapon — sometimes ruining lives — was one of the paranoid-in-chief’s favorite amusements. Of course there is the possibility that more than a dozen people’s IRS audits — in defiance of the laws of probability — just happened to come up simultaneously, by coincidence. If so, I’ll just have to live somehow with the thought that I have done a posthumous injustice to an innocent man.

To those who feel I am too hard on Mr. Nixon, yes, I willingly acknowledge his many gifts, his intellect and his great accomplishments.

Of course I have not forgotten his remarkable feat of “opening up” China.

I’m a bit younger than you. My Grandma took me to the V-J Day Parade in our city. I was less than 3 months old. I have absolutely no memory of the event. Apparently, your timing is off. Several decades later, any watcher of Judge Judy, Judge Alex and any of the several dozens of other such programs know that one must be prepared when one goes to court. Unfortunately for you and John Lennon, those shows weren’t on yet. However the rule of law won out. Apparently H.R. and Tricky Dick didn’t know of your incompetence. They thought that you were articulate and influential just because you were on television. That’s one on them (posthumously). It is also one on me. I thought you were a cultural icon!

As one who is senior to you in years (barely), among the many other things I have forgotten is just how funny you are. There’s got to be a cable channel out there with an open slot – if you would take it.

I remember my dad, then dying of cancer, finding relief in the televised Watergate hearings. The drearieness of chemotherapy receded when Sam Ervin gaveled the hearings to order.

I never thought I’d see a President that made me miss Nixon, so mindbendingly stupid and vacuuous, so uninterested in the world and who thinks war is fought with toy soldiers who can be thrown away when they break down.

The barb on Nixon’s feat of “opening up” China and the poisoned toys coming from that country is classical Cavett. A half truth. China was opened up by Western opium dealers, many of whom, as the Harvard savant John K Fairbank has pointed out, were missionaries. Some missionaries!

I have had a crush on you since I was 16 and you were 30-something. You were one of the first grown-ups I remember who wore a suit, looked and sounded like somebody’s Dad but whom I knew deep down was a speaker of truth to power. How right I was.
I (and my ilk) also remember thinking that nothing could ever be any worse for America than Nixon was.
That part, I got all wrong.

When I first heard of Nixon’s enemies’ list I wrote to him and asked him could he please put my name on it because I felt that I qualified for this august status. I guess he must have done so because that year I was audited by the IRS for the first and only time in my life. Coincidence? Maybe.

Last week I stood before the city council of my tiny rural town, relying on my long-past legal career and my inclination to bloviate, and totally flubbed it. Who was this moron who had taken control of my body? ! ? Goodness.

I feel a bit better now, knowing that it happened to the talented Mr. Cavett, as well. Thanks!

Ah, yes. The Prussian Guard performing for the Trickster. With the long-running hurdy-gurdy show on Pennsylvania Avenue since 2001, there might be a tendency to remember Watergate as the good old days. Thanks for blocking that exit.

That bit about the ‘poisoned’ toys was a bit much, but just a bit. RMN, no matter how you look for a spot to polish him, was a disaster. Still, when compared to El Cuadillo (Ronaldo Reagano of the laced riding boots) and the intervening Bushes he reeks of probity and foreign policy acumen

Just wanted to add to Nixon accomplishments.
Not to mention Kaiser permanente and HMO’s in general.
I’d tell you it was a great article but would rather not face an audit.
Please note that the above was not in any way a swipe at the current administration.
(Written for the TSP people reading this)

I remember listening to my sisters and parents laughing and shrieking during the “Dick Cavett Show” which, unfortunately for me, ran well past my bedtime. On rare occassions I would be allowed to watch, and John’s appearance was one of those times.

Yes, Mr. Cavett, I was one of those young people for whom you thought John might be a role model. You failed to tell the Court, however, that you were the more important role model, that John appeared on your show because he understood the voice you gave to ordinary, thinking Americans who were deeply disturbed by the direction their country was taking. You expanded our horizons and showed us how an intellect could be funny, probing and deeply satisfying all at the same time.

My family loved your show, much as my wife and I and our three children now love The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Thank you for weighing in again and reminding us that individual freedom in a democracy is sometime protected more by those who question their government as it is by those who defend it.

Wonderful blog Mr. Cavett, but I’d like to point out that although a formal order of deportation may not have been entered in his case, Yusuf Islam (f/k/a Cat Stevens) was physically deported from the U.S. to the U.K. in 2004.

I had forgotten about the Lennon deportation fiasco and didn’t even know of your role in it, Mr. Cavett.

But as one only a bit younger than you, I too remember those McCarthy hearings and the naivete of so many post-World War II Americans.

I clearly recall coming home from school and seeing my mom ironing and staring angrily at the TV set while she worked. The McCarthy hearings were on, and she was angry, not because Sen. McCarthy was or was not doing a good job. Those hearings were replacing her soap operas, and she wasn’t happy.

“What are they doing, Mom?” I asked, as I heard the phrase “Mr. Chairman, point of order!” for about the 100th time.

“They’re looking for Communists,” she snapped, “and I wish they’d find them already so I can watch ‘Guiding Light.’

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The host of “The Dick Cavett Show” — which aired on ABC from 1968 to 1975 and on public television from 1977 to 1982 — Dick Cavett is the author, most recently, of “Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets.” The co-author of “Cavett” (1974) and “Eye on Cavett” (1983), he has also appeared on Broadway in “Otherwise Engaged,” “Into the Woods” and as narrator in “The Rocky Horror Show,” and has made guest appearances in movies and on TV shows including “Forrest Gump” and “The Simpsons.” Mr. Cavett lives in New York City and Montauk, N.Y.